New Physics Beyond The Higgs? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR
Late last year, when most people were getting ready for the holidays, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine at CERN,
the European Organization for Nuclear Research, made a startling
announcement: Their two massive detectors had identified a small bump in
the data with an energy level of about 750 GeV.
This level is about six times larger than the energy associated with the
Higgs particle. (To go from energy to mass divide the energy by the
square of the speed of light.) For comparison, the mass of a proton, the
particle that makes the nuclei of all atoms in nature, is about 1 GeV.
The Higgs is heavy — and this new bump, if associated with a new
particle, would be really heavy.
At the more abstract, a new physics event at energies six times higher
than where the Higgs was found would mean that we are edging a bit
closer to the Big Bang, the event that marks the origin of the universe.
There is a huge gap in energy between the Higgs and the Big Bang, of
course, but getting new data at higher energies can clarify how to move
closer. This kind of fundamental physics has a very noble heritage, as
it traces its origins to the beginnings of Western philosophy and even
beyond — to questions related to our origins. If we picture creation as a
puzzle, every new piece we discover helps us understand our origins a
little better. The new bump may not give us a final answer (it's not
clear we can ever get there), but it'd certainly make the picture
clearer.
